31. August 2009

While the design of democracy is a wonderful thing, democratic design is less positive. We’ve heard over and over that “everyone is a designer,” and that through a combination of user-generated content, ubiquity of access, and new tools, design has finally made its way out of an ivory tower and into the grasp of the masses. What, exactly, have the masses gotten their grubby paws into? Can one truly claim to be a designer when they upload a picture to Facebook or remix a video for YouTube?

Video and audio is part of the web, deeply ingrained in everyday browsing, whether it’s a news site with audio reports, a social network with links, songs and videos suggested by friends and acquaintances, or the now-famous YouTube. As with many web technologies and trends, there are parallels between the use of such media on the web, and on an intranet. There are also some significant differences.

29. August 2009

Conclusion:Balsamiq Mockups is a great and affordable prototyping tool with a great money/value-ratio (you get more than you paid for). For $79 you get a powerful tool which still is easy to learn.(my other reviews)

Mockups is designed to help you and your team or clients iterate on wireframes as early in the process as possible, when it's cheapest to do so. [...] Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner.

The first step in our design ideation process comes before any “official” sketching is done: we describe the users’ ideal experience in words. The scenarios we develop at this stage are forward-looking and technology-agnostic, focusing on the personas and how they think, feel and behave rather than on specific interface elements or technical implementations. We also identify experience keywords that describe the emotional response that users should have to the product. Not having to answer the “how” frees us up to think big, imagining the best-case scenario for how the product supports each persona in achieving his or her goals.

In short, wireframes are the skeleton of a site and precede the surface design and come after the structure. However in the agile process of development a more layered approach enables developers and designers working simultaneously. Wireframes are evolving documents of discussion and this should always be remembered.

28. August 2009

Al Gore invented the Internet. Drinking alcohol keeps your body warm. You won’t get pregnant if you stand on your head after … well, you get the idea. Myths are those hard-and-fast rules that often start as a plausible idea or once-off observation that grow and distill into ‘common knowledge’ as they virtually spread. I know I’ve believed a few of these. I’ve also asked my UX expert Twitter friends for their UX Myths – and they have many!

27. August 2009

User research is a crucial component of any website or product development process. It will help you to identify the needs of your users and demonstrate how your website, intranet or application can be improved. Focus groups and usability testing are two very useful but very different user research disciplines.

Netter Artikel in Form einer kurzen Übersicht oder Einführung.

26. August 2009

Best Bets are essentially editorial picks that appear at the top of the search results. They are a manual intervention for use when the search engine isn’t developing the best results for the users. Some sites use them to fix just a couple of problematic queries but others have built up extensive databases of thousands of best bets.

25. August 2009

To get to the point where we can design systems to take advantage of complex physical interactions will require an taking a new look at how the fields of kinesthetics, anthropometrics and optical flow , relate to interface design. These fields will be as important to designers as information architecture and form giving are today.

Most of the media coverage around this data set centered on the headline-ready fact that almost 10 percent of the search terms were, shall we say, adult in nature. However, if we can move past the unsurprising fact that children are curious about human sexuality, a few interesting trends can be discovered about internet usage patterns for the under-18 set.

Sind ein paar ganz gute Punkte dabei.

24. August 2009

E-commerce holds the promise of making customers’ lives easier and more enjoyable. They can find things that they otherwise would never come across, and they can order anywhere, anytime, with only a few button clicks. People enjoy the pleasure of the discovery, the simplicity of the process, and the convenience of the delivery. But on many e-commerce sites, customers do not always understand what’s being offered and whether it will be of any personal benefit.

Ein guter Artikel der wirklich einen Blick lohnt.

23. August 2009

Your form validation can make the difference between a user completing your form or abandoning it altogether. [...] Don’t accuse your users of having made an error. They may well have done so, but it could just as easily have been your fault.

In today’s market, user experience is a key differentiator for products. Companies are innovating more creative approaches to product definition and design and rushing to add talent to their existing product design organizations. Many business leaders are struggling with the issue of where to place new UX processes and professionals within their organizations.

19. August 2009

I found myself having a hard time explaining what I do for a living. “I'm an interactive designer Mom.” I answered. “So what is it exactly?” Mom still wondered. “Well, you know. At frog Design, we design innovations and everything that tries to improve people's lives in the future,” I tried to explain but at the same time I realized I just made things worse. “Like, computer stuff,” Mom tried to clarify. “Well sometimes,” I answered without realizing that I would be answering my neighbors' computer virus problems since my mother relayed to the community that I work on “computer stuff” in the US. I must be very good at fixing computers.

I’ve always found it interesting reading the design process of others. It’s good to have an insight into others work, to see if I can learn anything from their process but also for curiosity. So I’ve put together a break down of my design process, using a recent project as a real life example, Newsgroup Direct.

17. August 2009

There are many theories about this logo and many of them are just that. Find out the truth, read the interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of the original Apple logo, who will tell you all about his design.

Collaborative design methods play a key role in aligning team members towards a shared and strategic project vision. In this article we describe how user stories stimulate and facilitate discussion and decision making with clients in the development of a User Experience Strategy. [...] A collaborative approach enables clients to actively participate in the process, increasing the likelihood of achieving a collective vision for the project. This article focuses on the first step in the journey towards collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy and is concerned specifically with how user stories are generated, themed and prioritized.

Der Beitrag ist wirklich sehr lesenswert.

16. August 2009

The usefulness of any system can be defined in terms of utility and usability. Although these terms are related, they are not same .Utility refers to the ability of the product/system to perform a functional or system-administration specific tasks. The more tasks the product is designed to perform, the more utility it has. Usability is a measure of how easy it is to use a product to perform required tasks.

Progress bars are prevalent in modern user interfaces. Typically, a linear function is employed such that the progress of the bar is directly proportional to how much work has been completed. However, numerous factors cause progress bars to proceed at non-linear rates. Additionally, humans perceive time in a non-linear way. This paper explores the impact of various progress bar behaviors on user perception of process duration. The results are used to suggest several design considerations that can make progress bars appear faster and ultimately improve users’ computing
experience.

Es lohnt sich, da mal reinzuschauen.

15. August 2009

Meetings are often the bane of any project's existence. They can make or break your project - and it's important to understand some of the basics of planning appropriate meetings and how to keep them on track.

Da stehen wirklich ein paar sehr gute Tipps drin.

14. August 2009

We’ve come a long way on the web today. Or have we? While we’ve innovated in many areas, we’ve also continued to disregard pre-existing issues. And in some cases, we have also created new ones. Here is my list of the top 65 most annoying things about the web today. They’re in no particular order, but I have organized them into what I consider core groups.

In this podcast, I interview Bogo Vatovec, an expert in change management, user experience, and knowledge engineering, about the technical writer’s role in interface design. Bogo is a senior member of the STC and a regular presenter at conferences worldwide. For example, at the last STC Summit, Bogo participated in a panel on career trends.

Forms can be found on almost every website; from contact or feedback forms in small websites to bank details in commerce websites, from registration to communication, from banking to searching. [...] We wanted to validate these rules and seek further insights into various aspects of web form design. This lead us to carry out an eye-tracking study to observe how people react to different form designs, and to find out where users look when they are presented with a big list of text boxes.

Sehr lesenswerter Beitrag.

11. August 2009

The ability to “play with the data” is a critical capability in analysis. We utilize this technique in many situations: searching for patterns or trends in our observations; or as another preparatory stage for further analysis. Sorting data in some way - alphabetic, chronological, complexity or numerical - is a form of manipulation.

This is a list of must-follows for anyone interested in usability. It includes some of the usual suspects, as well as a few folks who just have a knack for finding and commenting about useful stuff. Their updates are often amusing, frequently instructive, and usually relevant to a broad range of technical, design, and business disciplines.

8. August 2009

As Robert Fabricant says, human behavior is our medium. If you don’t understand people, you won’t be a good UX designer. You must have the capacity to hypothesize about the reasons behind the actions you observe people take. You must be able to see things from another person’s perspective. UX designers do more than think about what people do; they actively research it.

There are a lot of writing tips floating around cyberspace. Most deal with general writing skills, which are actually less important than you might think. The truth is, most online readers don’t care much about grammar, spelling, and punctuation as long as they get the information they need.

Auch hier sind einige sehr lesenswerte Hinweise dabei.

7. August 2009

These are some of the more common mistakes that I’ve seen in web copy and some tricks that I use every day to write effectively, from e-mails to site pages.
You don’t need to be an English major to understand any of this advice either. It is written in plain English that everyone can understand.

Designing and building a successful social website or application is no mean feat. Adding a social dimension to an existing experience is trickier still. Nevertheless, the skills to do so are well worth cultivating, as the ubiquitous, pervasive, massively interconnected world of the Internet and allied digital networks, such as mobile SMS connections, have unlocked a growing panoply of opportunities for social relationships, remote presence, real-time interactions and the capacity for self-organized groups of people to coordinate their behavior and collaborate on changing the world.

If you’re serious about web design you need to familiarize yourself with Industry Best Practice and experience of what is working in real life and what is not. In the end it is the end users experience that counts and where some designers are focusing mainly on look and feel I can assure you that the end user will first of all require it to be easy to navigate, read etc. (usability) and to be loading fast and reliably.

Lohnt sich da mal drüber zu schauen.

5. August 2009

It's easy to create a set of plausible statements about the primary users of a product or web site. We can make assumptions about their goals, their background and their behaviours, find a suitable bit of clip art and voila, we have a persona. It's much harder to create an accurate description of users that the design team will believe in and actually use to resolve design disputes.

Sollte man sich wirklich mal durchlesen, wenn die Zeit da ist.

4. August 2009

Content analysis is an essential part of many UX design projects that involve existing content. Examples of such projects include migrating a Web site to a new platform or design, merging multiple Web sites into one, or assessing Web content for reuse in a new channel. Just as you cannot nurture a garden without regularly inspecting its plants and flowers, you cannot take proper care of your content without looking at it closely.

Emotion is one of the most powerful elements of an experience, and also the most difficult to design. Yet games regularly inspire intense emotions, drawing players into the experience they offer, and making these experiences enjoyable and memorable.
With the best games, these feelings endure long after we finish playing. Plainly, interaction designers who want to better understand how to inspire emotions could learn a lot from games.

3. August 2009

A recent patent application from Yahoo explores ways that a search engine might consider the amount of time it takes different types of pages to render and other issues involving how quickly pages respond to a visits in ranking, classifying and crawling those pages.

With a dark design comes less readability, less appeal for most readers and less opportunity for conventional design elements. In this post, we’ll discuss a few tips to make your next dark website design appeal to a broader audience, while letting you, the designer, express your creativity.

2. August 2009

For the past hundred years at least, the creation and management of metadata has primarily been the responsibility of information professionals engaged in cataloging, classification, and indexing; but as information resources are increasingly put online by the general public, metadata considerations are no longer solely the province of information professionals.

1. August 2009

We all understand that times are hard right now. Finding the money to fund a project can be difficult and you will find yourself paring the project plan way down in order to complete it. Just because the money dries up doesn’t mean user testing needs to dry up.